KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 17 September
admin | 21 September 2017The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground
And now for something completely different, it might seem. Another account of the creation of our humanity that seems and feels completely different from what we heard in the reading of the first chapter of Genesis. Is it contradictory or complementary? We are being challenged about how we read and think.
Genesis One presents creation as a powerful, orderly and intellectual process and ends with the creation of our humanity. “God created man” – ha’adam meaning human being generically considered and as from the ground, adamah – “in his own image (betsalmo); in the image of God (betsalem ‘elohim) he created him; male and female he created them.” It is powerful concept. Alone of all of the things of the created order, our humanity is said to be made in the image of God. An image both is and is not what it resembles. We are not God. You are not your selfie! All of us, male and female, are said to be made in God’s image. Think about how that challenges us about how we think and act towards one another. To know that you are made in God’s image is to recognise that every other human being is made in that same image.
It speaks to the special dignity of our humanity but to be made in the image of God does not mean that we are God. Both modern science and Genesis agree that nature and therefore our humanity as part of the natural order is not divine. But what does it mean to be made in God’s image? What do we know about God in the first chapter of Genesis? God speaks, commands, names, blesses, hallows, makes and makes freely, looks and beholds, seeks goodness, shows care and concern, sustains and provides. Somehow these verbs suggest some of the features which belong to our humanity. They speak to our rationality.
Our humanity, too, is given dominion over every other living thing. The idea of dominion has been a troubling concept and one which has been often misconstrued. If we assume that it means the power to dominate, manipulate, and exploit nature and, by extension, other human beings, then we become the bullies of creation. Perhaps that has been a feature of modernity and one which worries us, as it should. Yet that expresses a very limited and destructive form of reason that assumes that our rationality is primarily instrumental, as essentially directed to practical actions and outcomes but as nothing in itself. Reason becomes merely a tool, a means to an end. That misses the deeper meaning of dominion. The word (at least in its Latin form) refers to the dominus, to the Lord, to what God does as the model and truth of what humans are to do and to be. It is not about bullying and lording it over everything and everyone. The Genesis account emphasises how our humanity is connected to everything else in the good order of creation as well as having a special dignity within it. That is surely the main point, a dignity that requires our respect for everything and everyone else.
What then are we to make of Genesis Two? It turns from the grand pageant of creation cosmically considered to focus more intimately upon the nature and place of our humanity. It begins, however, with a kind of overview about the intrinsic goodness of the created order and about God “rest[ing] on the seventh day and hallow[ing] it”. This counters the divinization of the heavenly bodies and the worship of them in other early cultures, a worship often associated with the seventh day. Here the emphasis will be on our worship of God, not nature as God, and upon the importance and necessity of contemplation and not simply action. Along with that emphasis comes the very fact of our connection to everything else that is made. Our humanity is formed of dust of the ground. That serves to counter any and every aspect of hubris, our overweening pride and sense of self-importance. It quite literally humbles us by recalling us to the humus, the ground of our existence, even to the dust. But we are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. Dignified dust.
So Genesis Two can be best seen as complementing Genesis One about the nature and place of our humanity within the created order. We are connected both to the dust and to God, both to what is lowly and to what is high. It captures a twofold aspect of our humanity which speaks to the human condition, a view which is reflected in other cultures and tradition. “Many are the wonderful things,” the Chorus says, for instance, in Sophocles’ play Antigone, “but the most wonderful thing of all is man.” The Greek word for man here is anthropos meaning human being. Yet the word “wonderful” can also be translated as “terrible”! As we will discover, both from the standpoint of Genesis and our contemporary world, our humanity can be “the most terrible thing of all”!
Overall, though, the Genesis account of creation in these first two chapters emphasises the important idea of creation as orderly and good. What a wonderful counter to the often despairing attitudes on display in our overly anxious world! To be reminded of the goodness of the God created world changes our attitude and approach to nature and to one another. The point is made ever so strongly when Genesis Two says that God has placed us in “the Garden of Eden” where everything is at hand, “the tree of life” and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. Creation is a garden or to use a Persian word, paradise. Such are some of the features of the awesome beginnings which these scriptures present to us. A world in which to take delight as well as ourselves. For “it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.”
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy